by Byron Lane
“Is that your end game here?” I ask.
“End game? Fuck no. I don’t want this to ever end. I’m a lifer! I love being a gatekeeper. It’s better than the alternative, a fucking consumer. Can you imagine watching a movie and not knowing any names in the credits? Hell! Do you know Vanessa Redgrave’s mantra before she goes out onstage?”
“No,” I say, raising my eyebrows, bracing for a possible taste of genius.
“Her assistant told me that before every show, she closes her eyes, pictures the audience, and says, ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’ She says ‘Fuck you’ to the people paying to see her! It’s almost like she’d rather be in an empty theater, like her art is the treasure, she’s not doing it for them, she’s doing it for her. Isn’t that amazing! That’s how I feel! I’m an assistant for my own pleasure.”
“But you don’t make art,” I say. “You’re an assistant to a publicist.”
“A famous celebrity publicist! That’s my art, baby!” Jasmine says, putting her martini to her lips and taking the last sip. “Oh, fuck,” she says. “There’s Poker Face. Do I look cuter than her?” Jasmine turns to me and fluffs her hair as a pop diva’s assistant passes us.
“Do you think it’s weird that I call you Jasmine and not a nickname?” I ask.
“Jasmine is my nickname,” she says.
I nearly drop my drink.
“Oh, careful, baby,” she says.
“Who are you guys?” I ask.
“I like the name Jasmine. It was inspired by a bag of jasmine rice, because that’s the first thing my boss ever made me buy and I spilled it all over the floor of her Bentley and two years later we still find bits of it stuck in our sandals.”
“Don’t be shocked,” West adds. “None of us have real names, or real lives.” She turns to a passing bartender. “I guess I’ll have a glass of champagne, please,” leaving out that it’ll be her third.
“Bruce?” I ask.
“Short for Bruce Wayne,” Jasmine says. “His fancy agent boss represents the old Batman.”
“Holy shit, what is real? What do you guys call me?”
Jasmine pauses.
Assistant Bible Verse 124: Never ask about your nickname.
“You can tell me,” I say.
“Baby,” she says.
“Baby!” I shout.
“Yeah,” Jasmine says. “Like ‘Kathi’s baby.’”
“What? Kathi’s baby?! That’s the best you could do? Baby?”
“Well, there was some debate,” Jasmine says.
“But we decided it’s sort of perfect since you nurse at her tit,” West says, her eyebrows cocked.
“Her—what?! I do not!” I yell.
“I can’t believe you’re so surprised,” Jasmine says. “We’ve been saying it to your face.”
“When you’ve said, ‘Hey, baby,’ to me, I thought you were just greeting me affectionately!”
“Well, we don’t all have great nicknames,” Jasmine says. “We’re all victims of what others think of us, of our identity based on our employer. It doesn’t matter who you really are, it’s how you’re perceived.”
“But I’m not Kathi’s baby,” I complain. “I’m her equal.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Jasmine says, putting her hand on my shoulder, giving me a gentle shake. “No, you’re not.”
“But we’ve been together a lot, and month and after month we’re getting closer. I’ve been a huge help for her mental illness,” I say.
“You’re lucky your boss admits she has mental illness. The rest of us mostly have to manage up,” West says.
“See what we mean,” Jasmine says. “You’re like a baby fearing Mommy will be unwell and hold back the milk.”
“It’s not about the mommy milk.” I say, cringing. “It’s just: Shouldn’t we help?” I ask, wringing my hands, feeling sweat on my forehead and back, the telltale signs my anxiety is piping up. “Shouldn’t we do something for them? Find better doctors or something?”
“Just take her money,” Jasmine says. “And don’t get too involved. Or, in your case, try to get less involved.”
“I’ll drink to that,” West says, her glass reloaded.
“But I’m helping her,” I insist. “I’m proud of that. I really do feel like family—not her baby, but her family.”
Hey, Siri, I want to be open, to be honest, to get credit. I want my colleagues to give me praise, which doesn’t come.
“These people will never be our family,” Jasmine says.
“But I’m so close,” I say.
“No, you’re not,” she says.
I smile, my lie, my default emotional setting, better than my default physical one: sweating and clawing at the (now longer) curl on the side of my head. No sense in arguing with Jasmine et al. Maybe they’re right. I hear my father screaming inside me: DO NO HARM! It’s a doctor’s oath, but Dad mistakenly thinks it’s the Boy Scout motto. He forced me to be a Scout and had fantasies of me going all the way to Eagle, but it was clear early on that I wasn’t destined for it. I was more obsessed with which of my handsome scout mates would be sleeping in my tent with me than how to start a fire with lawn clippings. He finally let me quit after I broke a glass in our kitchen. It slipped out of my hand and shattered. He was at work, and I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I gathered up all the broken bits, put them in a Ziploc storage bag, and threw them into a briar patch next to our house. When he got home, he happened to find the one tiny millimeter-sized sliver of glass I must have missed. “WHO DID THIS?” he screamed. “WHO BROKE THIS?” I copped to it, shyly, meekly, in a head-down kind of plea for mercy. He wasn’t violent with his hands—he never hit me or spanked me—he was violent with his words, which cut me and still labor in my head. “WHERE’S THE REST OF THE GLASS?!”
I told him it was in the briar patch and he exploded.
“WHAT IF A FUCKING RABBIT CUTS ITSELF ON THE GLASS?! DON’T THE SCOUTS SAY, ‘DO NO HARM’?! GO FUCKING GET IT! ALL YOU DO IS HARM EVERYONE AROUND YOU!” I spent hours inching my way into the briars to try to get the little baggie of glass. Fearing snakes and cuts and the sight of my own blood, I finally got one of his ladders from the basement and plopped it on top of the briars, walked across, and retrieved the contraband. No rabbits harmed.
DO NO HARM! His scream still rings inside me, still applies to my life—and now to Kathi’s—despite my best efforts to quash his violence. Therapista says a mature mind can decipher which thoughts to keep and which to ignore.
I’m thinking of Kathi as I drink beside these new friends, new colleagues. I’m thinking of how I can help her, free her from harm. The alcohol soothes me, the sharp taste and warmth in my throat remind me of times when my drinking and pot smoking were a regular ritual.
I decline another drink as Jasmine and West order more, apparently making a long night of it. Crooner switches from a vodka soda to a Cosmo, his pink fingernails matching his drink.
“That’s colorful,” I say.
“Just like your boss,” he says.
“Yeah. But I’m working on it.”
Do no harm.
“And, anyway,” I add, “her colors are a little fun, right?”
“You know what they say about color,” Jasmine says. “Put all the colors together and it just turns to black.”
10
The boxes arrive en masse, a little more than a year after Dad’s threat to send them, his timing always horrendous. They’re a collection of the tattered remains of my mother. They’re waiting for me on my front porch like bombs—six boxes, twelve by twelve, duct-taped within an inch of their cardboard lives, and the handwriting in Sharpie on each is unmistakably Dad. I taste PTSD, triggered simply by the way he writes, the whirl and edge of his letters like when he would mark up my school book reports and force me to rewrite them from scratch. That same handwriting from childhood cards my mother would force him to sign. That same hand, which hasn’t given me a card since the day Mom died those many years ago.
> After a long day surviving Kathi—she went on a shopping spree last night and this morning asked me to return everything—plus a long commute home, I’m tired and have to go to the bathroom and just want to rest, and now Dad has sent more work for me to do. I put my bag inside and start hauling the boxes into my tiny apartment.
These boxes: Between my mother and Kathi, now I have two women taking up space in my life.
The boxes still smell like my father’s basement, the smell having survived shipping across the country, a no doubt violent packaging and delivery, and worst of all they survived time—these things should have been sorted years ago. I resent him for making me deal with them now because it’s a convenient time for him. What about what’s convenient for me?
I stack the boxes in front of my small, ratty sofa to use them as a cramped, ugly coffee table of memories of Mom. I have no urge to open them. I’m too busy to dive into Dad’s mess. I’m too busy with a new mother figure to deal with my old one.
* * *
Kathi’s life has been mostly mellow.
Assistant Bible Verse 125: Never let your guard down.
Sleep, bake, Vegas, repeat.
The sleep schedule is the same—this is one very tired movie star.
The bake schedule is elevated, with the kitchen of late often filled with cookies, apple pies, three-layer chocolate cakes.
Vegas trips mostly happen when I’m not there—on nights and weekends—or not at all. The bank account has been stable; Kathi’s business manager is harassing me less and less about Kathi’s spending—which I suppose by their standards has been in check. And I feel like I have her life under control, her details a fixture in my psyche: Her alias at hotels is Aurora Borealis. Her favorite dinner is Magnolia Bakery banana pudding. Her preferred psych ward is Cedars.
I watch Kathi Kannon live her life—have lunch with William Shatner, buy a new giant plastic cow for her front yard, autograph a fan’s buttock—and I feel alive, electrified, perhaps by proxy, but no matter. Kathi Kannon has been my antidote.
Hey, Siri, I’m having a blast.
Hey, Siri, I’m part of the family.
Hey, Siri, I want more.
Therapista says greed knows no end.
Why drink from a puddle when you can drink from the ocean.
In the almost two years since Kathi came into my life, or I came into hers, I feel a new surge of aliveness within me. I now crave the things that come with a mindset no longer besieged by depression: I want a home, dog, health, stability, a relationship—all the treasures that feel within my reach having taken this journey so far, treasures at the opposite end of the Kathi Kannon rainbow.
If travel is a wonderful alternative to suicide, so is dating, especially when you work for Kathi Kannon. Dating is not so much an escape from reality as a way to augment it. It’s looking at endless other people and seeing them as possibilities in your life, wondering how your world would transform with them in it, how you would look in their social-media feeds, their apartment, sharing their clothes. Dating can make new, brighter things seem possible. Of course, it has the opposite effect if “dating” goes on too long and consistently doesn’t end well. But, for now, I’m looking at my options with optimism. I feel worthy of a relationship, maybe for the first time ever. It also feels easier now that I believe I have something to offer, now that I have a secret weapon, an advantage, a confidence. I don’t have great beauty—I’m, like, a 6 by Los Angeles standards, surrounded by competition like models and guys wearing designer boots at nine A.M. at Ralphs. I don’t have real money or political influence. My superpower is: I work for Priestess Talara.
People in Los Angeles seem to dread the question “What do you do for a living?” Most people here are not doing what they want to do. Their day jobs as waiters and baristas are rebranded as “survival jobs,” but it’s all the same—something they don’t want to define them. But not me. Not anymore. I want to be asked. I wait for it. I bait people into asking the question. They ask me, “What do you do for a living?” And on more than one occasion I point to the T-shirt they’re wearing, the T-shirt with Nova Quest and Kathi Kannon’s iconic image on it, and I say, “I work for her.”
I want my job to define me.
I’m updating my OkCupid account with a new picture of myself, with my new, longer hair—now past my chin—and new glasses. Kathi took me to a store on Robertson Boulevard that only sells high-end vintage frames, and she picked out a tortoiseshell number that I’m getting used to, trusting her that they look good. All of the changes she’s making in me are requiring cautious adjustment. I’m still not sure whether she’s just amusing herself by making me into as much of a clown as possible, but even if she is, I admit, I’m enjoying the attention.
I’m finally filling in my dating profile, answering the dumb questions, taking the steps to finally be someone who’s actively dating—not just watching from outside the arena.
My self-summary:
People say I look like Frodo. I want to adopt a dog and name her Whitney Houston. I have an irreverent sense of humor. I might have a therapist. I’m from New Orleans but don’t have an accent. I accidentally signed up for a women’s gym one time, but they were very nice to me.
Nice to meet you, HipGuy2. He looks a little too much like Mr. Bean.
Nice to meet you, Footballer. He’s hot but a little too into feet.
Nice to meet you, Wine&Travel. He’s chronically unemployed.
I’ve been making a mini-career out of OkCupid. I’m messaging dude after dude, waiting for one who writes back, and writes back something interesting, compelling, some proof of my worth of companionship, of having a whole, living, human experience.
What I’m doing with my life:
I’m an assistant to an actress. I used to write TV news. I have a sweet tooth.
I’m meeting men in marathon swaths, sometimes several per week, all dates, no sex.
Nice to meet you, Tye: so boring.
Nice to meet you, Matt: lives with his parents.
Nice to meet you, Tal: not as pictured.
I read their profiles, search for them on Facebook, try my best to screen them, but mostly I find myself putting these guys up against a new standard: Could I ever introduce them to Kathi? It’s a new twist on: Can you bring them home to meet your mother? My self-esteem isn’t quite high enough yet that I would rule all of the duds out if left to my own devices, but I think enough of Kathi that the thought of bringing them to her adds a new hurdle they have to clear, an obstacle course in my mind, where Kathi is taking up residence, holding me to greater goals, becoming my surrogate self-esteem.
I now buy clothes with colors in them. I like that I can tuck my long hair behind my ears. I had my 2002 Nissan Sentra detailed for the first time ever, and as soon as I’m out of debt, I’ll get a new car—something that goes well with the new me.
The most private thing I’m willing to admit:
I’ve never been in a serious relationship. I guess I haven’t met the right person. I think I haven’t been emotionally available before now. I think I didn’t know what I wanted before now. Don’t worry, I’m putting together a list.;)
My Facebook game is also improving. I’m no longer seeing everyone as having a better life than me, because I’m feeling like mine is pretty decent these days. I actually start responding to event invites, liking photos of friends, and forcing myself to be social again—even if my social scene is a little work-related. My friendship circle is a Venn diagram of my Assistants Club and my real life. In the last weeks I’ve had a cupcake with West. Brunch with Crooner. And coffee with Bruce. Ugh, Bruce. Our hanging out wasn’t as formal as it might sound—I ran into him in the pain-relief aisle at Rite Aid and we walked next door for an espresso. His fade is growing out, his fancy shoes clanking a little less loudly these days—he’s waiting for the next hot hair-fashion trend, he’s waiting for the next move in his executive assistant career, but every path has been dry. I pat him on the back. �
��Hang in there. Remember silt? You can’t have a mountain without a valley every now and then.”
He says, “Huh?”
I relish the Shine of Kathi Kannon. I brag to my friends and dates about working for her. I try to drop into conversation as casually as possible, as often as possible, that I work for Priestess Talara, for Kathi Kannon. I show them how her famous iPhone contacts are merged with mine in my phone. I show them how her calendar has pink dots, which are her appointments, merged with blue dots, which are my appointments in my calendar app.
I love telling people I work for Kathi Kannon, film icon. I get mixed but always interesting reactions:
My doctor: “Who’s that?”
My landlord: “She’s still working?”
The clerk at Rite Aid: “She came in here once and stole something.”
These random people, I get some of them autographs for their birthday, as a thank-you gift, as a party favor—like Therapista, who got a framed picture of Kathi as Priestess Talara with an autograph that reads, “I’m blowing you now.”
If a celebrity calls my phone looking for Kathi, and I’m with a date, I put the celebrity on speaker and we hold our mouths in hushed awe while I take a message.
I’m showered with celebrity sightings, with gifts, with cash when I do something above and beyond. I google her just to see myself in the background of paparazzi photos, often with my face blurred or my body cut out, disembodied, where my arm is all that remains in the shot, or my foot, wearing a shoe she bought me.
I’m at a friend’s house for his birthday party—one of those affairs with a handsome bartender and too many balloons. I’m in the middle of one of my classic Kathi Kannon stories—the one about how we’re in some five-star luxury hotel in Spain and I’m trying to scrub a creamy white blob of Baskin Robbins Cookies ’N Cream ice cream out of the blouse she has to wear to Rufus Wainwright’s birthday opera in twenty minutes and, as I tell the crowd, “Then Kathi says to me, ‘That’s not ice cream.’”